T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest child of seven. Although born in America, he was most successful in Britain. He lived most of his life in England after completing postgraduate studies at Harvard. He was part of the modernist revolution, and achieved the status of a classic in his own lifetime. He received the Nobel Prize in 1948.
Eliot is regarded as both a “difficult” poet and an innovator. Despite his reputation for producing difficult poetry, he reached a large non-academic audience, and was a consistent bestseller. His reputation was further enhanced by the support of F. R. Leavis, and proponents of “New Criticism”, a methodology that espouses a close reading of texts as completely separate from authorial intention. Eliot also concurred with this method of textual analysis. For a very long time there was no complete biography of his life, despite his stature as a dominant figure in British poetry, theatre and criticism. Eliot had declared in his will that he wished that no biography be written, and the executors of his estate successfully prevented access to any biographical resources.
He was a firm member of the British literary establishment, and a prominent intellectual within the Church of England. He also held an influential position as a publisher of poetry with Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where his mark of approval was sought after for a successful poetic career. He also worked as a school-master, as an Extension Lecturer, and in the foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank. He founded and published his own quarterly, The Criterion, from 1922 to 1939.
Eliot’s oeuvre is extensive, and the reader is best advised to begin with The Waste Land (1922), Selected Essays 1917-1932 (1932), and Collected Poems 1909-1935 (1936). Eliot also wrote plays, notably his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935). His book of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) was recently transformed in the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
In 1921 Eliot suffered a breakdown, though he continued to write with Collected Poems 1909 – 1962 published in 1963. He preferred to write drama in his later years, particularly after Four Quartets (1943). He died on 4 January 1965, and his ashes were later interred according to his wishes in the west end of the parish church of East Coker.